


You Are What You Eat

by littlerhymes



Category: Chew
Genre: Cannibalism, Case Fic, Crime Fighting, Gen, Original Character Death(s), a day in the life, cibopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 06:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/littlerhymes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eat enough people, and eventually they start eating you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are What You Eat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fivefootnothing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivefootnothing/gifts).



> Thank you to my awesome beta-reader, SQ (proteinscollide)!
> 
> This takes place in the period around volumes #3-4. I've read through to volume #5 but haven’t read volume #6, so this may contradict some things in the later issues.

Halfway home, Colby has to pull the car over so Tony can throw up on the side of the road. "Fuck you asshole!" screams a cyclist, swerving to avoid the car's open door. Tony pauses to give the cyclist the finger before ducking down to retch again. 

These days he operates with a constant low-level of stomach upset, caused by repeatedly eating things which are legitimately disgusting, invariably unhygienic and basically fucking gross. No matter what Savoy had claimed during their brief partnership, cibopathy wasn't a higher calling: it was a one-way path to a constant round of indigestion and a running antibiotics prescription. 

If he thought the dead guy's brains had been bad enough going down, it's even worse coming back up, the sensations all mixed up now with his own revulsion in a messed-up feedback loop. 

But first, skip back fifteen hours:

At four in the morning, Tony was rousted out of bed by a call from Applebee. Befuddled by exhaustion, he made the stupid mistake of mentioning the twenty-hour shift he'd just pulled and that it might be nice to, you know, sleep for a minute.

"Ahahahaha so you think the FDA pays you to _sleep_?" Applebee said, building from sarcastic laughter to enraged explosion in less time than it would take to crack an egg. "You think I give a crap about what you did _yesterday_? I'll tell you what I give a crap about, Chu. I _give ___a _crap_ about wanting a perp in cuffs and a report on my desk by noon, _sharp_." He worked up to a bellow, loud enough to make Tony wince and for Amelia to turn over in her sleep. "SO WAKE THE FUCK UP AND GET OUT TO THAT CRIME SCENE." 

So he woke the fuck up and hitched a ride with Colby, who was infuriatingly upbeat despite pulling the same hours as Tony the day before. ("Selective endorphin release," he boasted, pointing to his head and the chips inside. "Is it ever wrong to punch a cyborg?" Tony replied, rubbing his eyes.) 

The incident itself was ugly, if unexceptional: a deal gone wrong, part of a turf war between rival gangs of poultry dealers. The one casualty was a kid who looked barely out of high school, no ID and no prints in the system. He'd been found by a beat cop, curled up in a dead-end street with his brains leaking all over the asphalt, a bunch of white feathers scattered over his body as a warning to anyone else looking to hone in on this patch. 

"How old do you reckon he is?" Tony said, looking down at the body. "Seventeen? Sixteen?" He sighed, shook his head. All this over a bunch of goddamn dead birds. 

Colby shrugged. He handed over the little cup of blood and brain matter that forensics had helpfully scraped up for Tony's benefit. "One sure way to find out, partner."

Tony tipped the contents of the cup into his mouth, closed his eyes, and tasted...

* * *

A sharp, red pain.

_But before that there was..._

"Sorry, kid." A gun cocked in his face, Sammy freezing as the hammer pulls back and...

_And then before that..._

"You got the stuff?" Sammy puts on a show of swagger, swallowing down his nerves. His first job, shit, he can't fuck this up, not if he ever wants to be able to look Victor in the eye again. His contact smiles too wide, yellowed teeth gleaming, saying, "Yeah. I got your stuff," and reaches into his jacket...

...

Victor Stilton slings an arm around his shoulder, saying, "You're a good kid, Sammy, you got a lot of potential. You handle this job, then I give you another job, okay?" Sammy tries not to gape at the bundle of notes Victor casually presses into his hand. "Half now and half after. You got it, Sammy?" Sammy, nodding absently, already thinking about what he's gonna do with the money – pills, sneakers, the latest issue of _Spicy Juggs_ – already thinking, man, Mikey is gonna be jealous as fuuuuck...

... 

The old lady's bag hangs loose on her arm and it's almost too easy for Sammy and Mikey to snatch it and run. When they finally stop, a few blocks later, he rifles through the bag and _fuck_ , it's just a bunch of useless crap like a watch that doesn't even work. There's no credit cards at all, just old photos, a senior's bus pass, and a membership card for the Critter Knitter Guild: Knitting with Pet Hair. Pissed off, they quickly shove the bag behind an overgrown hedge and take off again...

....

He's down at the pool hall with Mikey and the boys when Victor Stilton and his crew roll in, and straight away everyone's whispering because these are _the_ guys and everyone knows it: the guys with the schnitzel, the drumsticks, the freakin' wings, man. Sammy tracks their path through the hall with his eyes, wishing just once he could be the one on the inside, the one looking out...

...

"I dare you," Sammy says. "Yeah, well, I dare _you_ ," Mikey says straight back. "Okay, fine," Sammy says suddenly, and before he can think too hard about it he pushes himself over the edge of the bridge and jumps, the air whistling all around him and the water rushing up beneath him so so so so fast and...

* * *

Tony opened his eyes.

"Well?" drawled Colby, after watching him swallow it down with the same half-disgusted, half-impressed look he always got when Tony did his 'thing'. "Whatcha got, Chu?"

"Got an ID," he said at last. He pulled out the pieces he needed and filed the rest away for later. "Got some addresses, some names. Cell phone numbers. You ready?" 

At Colby's nod he started reeling them off. He watched as his partner's gaze went distant, the computer inside his head hooking up to the network, running matches, checking CCTV feeds. "Got 'em," Colby said, a few tense minutes later. His eyes snap back into focus again. "Let's go round up the troops, Chu."

Hours later, after chasing leads and rattling contacts for intel, they ran down the shooter – a thug called Sonny Giblet with a rapsheet long as his arm. They busted down the door of his piece-of-crap apartment just as he was climbing out the window and down the fire escape. 

While in the course of pursuit they managed to cause, uh, a little property damage ("Applebee's gonna have an aneurysm," Colby said glumly, contemplating the smashed shopfront and the overturned truck, "this is probably coming straight out of our bonuses." Tony did a double-take: "Wait. You got a bonus last year?!") but in the end they got their guy. 

It was tempting to push him around a bit harder than necessary but in the end Tony just slapped on the cuffs. No point getting too excited anyway, since as far as Tony was concerned, the second killer remained at large. Stilton had killed Sammy, too, by recruiting the kid and then sending him out to sink or swim, on the strength of a few empty promises. Probably wouldn't be the first or last time he did it, either.

They didn't have enough to put Stilton away and he wasn't high up enough in the food chain to make it worth the FDA's while, but back at the office Tony started doggedly adding all he knew to the case file anyway, every detail and every scrap of information he could glean from Sammy's memories, for the day when they could finally bring Stilton to book. One day, he thought, one day I'm gonna... 

It was a stupid, melodramatic thought that he didn't bother finishing, a rookie's dream he should have become too jaded for years ago. Yeah, well. He typed onwards, stabbing keys furiously.

Suddenly Colby slammed a hand down on his desk. Tony jumped and looked up from the computer screen, bleary-eyed. 

"You look like shit," Colby said bluntly. "Leave it. The paperwork can wait, Applebee's going to yell at us whether we finish it now or tomorrow. Come on, I'll drive."

"You? Drive? What else is new?" Tony said, but he didn't protest, just hit 'save' and grabbed his jacket.

* * *

Halfway home, Colby has to pull the car over so Tony can throw up on the side of the road. "Fuck you asshole!" screams a cyclist, swerving to avoid the car's open door. Tony pauses to give the cyclist the finger before ducking down to retch again. 

"You done?" Colby says loudly, looking in the other direction. For someone who's actually bumped genitals with Applebee, he can be surprisingly squeamish.

Tony spits to rid his mouth of the sour taste of bile, gargles from a bottle of water, spits again. "Yeah," he says finally, voice hoarse, wishing he had a mint. He slams the door and conscientiously fastens his seatbelt. 

"Actually," he says, making up his mind as Colby pulls out into traffic with careless speed and forgetting to signal, "before you drop me off, mind if we take a couple of detours?"

"Yeah?" Colby says. He gives Tony a shrewd look. "Is this to do with that dead kid from today?" 

"Uh," Tony says, stalling. He squints at a passing street sign and instead of answering says, "Hang a left here, would you?"

* * *

Edna May Mutton opens her front door to find the bag she had snatched off her arm the week before returned, only a little worse for wear. Though she'll never really forgive the little punks that did it, she's glad to have her treasures back again: the only remaining photos of her first dog, her dead husband's engraved watch, and a favorite pair of knitting needles.

* * *

Nina Baker receives an anonymous note telling her to look under the floorboards in her poor boy Sammy's room. Underneath the pornographic magazines (which she burns) and the stash of pills (which she flushes), she finds an envelope with three hundred dollars. She doesn't know how he got it – she doesn't _want_ to know how he got it – but lord knows he's paid enough for whatever misdeeds he committed, god rest his soul. Nina does as the note suggests: she keeps the money, and doesn't regret it.

* * *

"Michael P. Jiminez?" 

Mikey's on his own, just shooting hoops when they call his name. "Yeah?" he says, turning. His spine stiffens immediately at the approach of the two guys in suits and shades. One of them looks skinny and ill and angry, while the other reminds him of the Terminator, _after_ half his face got ripped off. "What do you want?" Mikey says roughly, backing up a few steps. "You the police or something?"

"Police?" The skinny one frowns and reaches inside his jacket. He pulls out a badge. "Kid, you're gonna _wish_ we were the police..."

* * *

"What on earth did you do to the poor kid?" Amelia says, looking up from the binder on her lap. 

"Oh, you know. He got pretty shook up when we told him about Sammy and then we just gave him the routine. _We've got our eye on you, next time you even think about putting a foot wrong the FDA is gonna be all over you like a rash._ That sort of thing." Tony shrugs and takes a slurp from his beetroot smoothie. "I'll check in on him if I can. And maybe Sammy's death and our little visit might scare him straight for a while. Or, well, maybe next time we get called out to a crime scene..." he trails off.

"You tried, anyway," Amelia says, squeezing his shoulder gently. "You're a good cop, Tony."

Privately Tony's not so sure that's true. A good cop knows to leave the case at the door. A good cop doesn't bring work home. A good cop understands their role ends when they get the conviction. 

Before the FDA, before Savoy, before it all got so damn _personal_ , Tony Chu was a pretty good cop. Then he started eating people and that's when everything changed.

The thing is, they're not just in his body, screwing up his digestive system and making him want to constantly hurl. They're also up in his head – killers and thieves and victims all mingling at once, some of them good and some of them bad, _all_ of them with unfinished business. Some days Tony wonders if this is what drove Savoy off the deep end: the constant whispers, the phantom memories, guilt, desires. 

He doubts though that Savoy ever wasted his time returning stolen purses or leaving anonymous notes for loved ones. That's because Savoy was, in his own crooked fucked-up way, a great cop. Tony, on the other hand? Almost certainly not a good cop. Though these days he's starting to suspect he'd be happy just to be a good person.

"You haven't picked yet," Amelia says, interrupting his thoughts. "So what's it going to be? French? Thai? Japanese?"

"Hmmm," he says thoughtfully, and gulps back some more smoothie. "Japanese, I guess. Haven't had that in a while, right?"

"Good choice." Amelia flips through to the J section of her portfolio, pulls out her favourite Japanese restaurant review, and starts to read out loud. 

"Mmmm..." Tony says some time later, sleepy and blissed out on just-fried gyoza, dipped in chili oil; agedashi tofu with finely-sliced scallions; bonito sashimi seared to perfection, served with ponzu sauce, cilantro, and garlic chips; and tonkotsu ramen in a rich pork broth, topped with pickled ginger, kikurage mushrooms and a salt-boiled egg. He pats his stomach absent-mindedly. "That was sooooo goooood."

"It's a gift," Amelia says, dryly. She leans over to drop a quick kiss on his mouth. "You know, it's kind of unfair this is the only way you ever get to really enjoy tasting food."

"Actually, I don't mind as much as I used to," he says slowly, realising it's true as he says it. He shrugs with one shoulder. "Partly because of what _you_ do. Partly because – well, it's a crappy job but someone's gotta do it, right?" 

Someone's got to bear witness. Someone's got to try to balance the scales.

"No one _has_ to do it," Amelia says, "but you do." She cards her fingers through his hair, and he leans into her touch, hmm-ing softly. "So," she says after a moment. "What do you want for dessert?"


End file.
